If you are blogging for business, and not about your cat, baby, fashion addiction, or celebrity-crush, you need to set some success metrics.
Without a statistical measure of your blogging progress, adding content to your blog on a regular basis can be an incredibly lonely proposition. Is anyone out there? Does anyone care?
However, even in the business blogging world, there are a wide variety of potential measures to gauge your momentum. It is imperative that you select the most relevant ones that match with your blog’s purpose and intent.
What’s the point?
The first step in that processis knowing why you are blogging. This sounds simple, but it is shocking how many bloggers are unclear on the core business rationale behind their blog initiative.
There are three options here:
- Blogging for content: This is when you write with considerable emphasis on search optimization, attempting to drive traffic to the blog via strategic content creation and keyword inclusion.
Blogging for commerce: Related to the first, but commerce-oriented blogs are more interested in conversion events than in traffic generation. Funneling traffic from the blog to some other destination (typically a corporate website or lead form) is the prime objective.
Blogging for community: These blogs seek to guild a consistent readership that interact with the blogger(s) and advocate on behalf of the content through other social outposts.
Measuring the point
Depending on the rationale for your blog, you need to select the most appropriate success metrics.
- These are your key metrics when blogging for content:
– Total visits,
– Percentage of new visits (a recent study to be released soon by Compendium Blogware shows that among 86 percent of corporate blogs, first-time visitors comprise over 60 percent of their total traffic), and
– Visits from search engines.
- These success measures are best for blogging for commerce:
– Average length of stay,
– Number of pages viewed per visit (both of these metrics measure depth of engagement, a key consideration when you’re trying to educate a potential customer and get them to take action), and
– Referrers from other sites (if other sites are driving significant traffic to your blog, you need to know what they are, to replicate that success with other, similar sites).
- Pay closest attention to these statistics if you are blogging for community:
– Repeat visits,
– RSS subscribers (repeat visits and subscribers both measure stickiness and consistency, blog elements that build community over time),
– Comments, and
– Referrers from social outposts like Twitter or Digg.
Note that the recommended success metrics are entirely different for each blog type, yet in much of my social media consulting work, corporate blog owners are invariably most interested in total visits and RSS subscribers.
This is especially misplaced with group written blogs, where the broad content focus and inconsistent tone makes RSS subscription less likely. Imagine subscribing to a magazine that was about tennis one month, and about cooking the next month. That is what a lot of multi-author corporate blogs feel like, so is it any wonder that there are few subscribers?
Blogging success is a slow march, not a mad dash. If you create consistently good content, and promote it vigorously, your blog should eventually succeed. But to ensure you are not disheartened in the meantime, select success metrics that are appropriate for your goals.
For more on advanced blogging, please see my post or slide presentation below:
View more presentations by Jay Baer.
Bottom line
Just because you have a blog does not mean your blogging objectives are the same as everyone else’s. There are three reasons to blog (other than personal blogging): content, commerce, or community.
Each type of blog has a different set of appropriate success metrics and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), so it makes no sense to measure your success based on blogging for commerce, if you actually blog to build community.
There are three KPIs based on type of blog, to which you should pay the most attention. Do that, and you’ll be a happier and more successful blogger.
P.S. – Visit My.ComMetrics (register yourself – benchmark your blog(s) => improve performance). You can get updates for this blog on Twitter by following @ComMetrics or get a free subscription by RSS, or get new posts via email:
Article source: ComMetrics – Using the right blog metrics
Please register for our Free webinar: Benchmarking with the right metrics
Pingback: avenlea
Pingback: Chris Rogers
Pingback: World Economic Forum
Pingback: mayyasi
Pingback: swissbusiness
Pingback: swissbusiness
Pingback: Urs E. Gattiker
Pingback: Ray van den Bel
Pingback: Lee Johnson
Pingback: SMM_News
Pingback: juanita essuahmensah
Pingback: Maher Farah
Pingback: Gustavo_Veliz
Pingback: Mika Matikainen
Pingback: DataInfoCom
Pingback: Robert Bacal
Pingback: Sample Quarterly Report to CEO and Executive Team | OpenView Labs
Pingback: Matthew King
Pingback: Perry A Davis Jr